Present Perfect

2007-10-2810:38 am

While procrastinating about drawing up some process diagrams to visualize integration tasks, I came across graphviz. By came across, I mean, I finally really looked at it after all those brief encounters with its use our output in other tools.

While it seems incredibly handy to be able to describe graphs programatically, it does have a painful learning curve. If you disagree, try running “dotty”, the visual editor :)

Anyway, here’s something right off the bat I can’t figure out: the documented shapes include note and tab, but when I use that as a shape attribute value, dot complains. I can’t figure out any way of listing supported node shape types either.

Any graphviz expert care to throw me a bone ?

On a related note, any idea why there is no shape for the common flowchart symbol for documentation, which is a rectangle with the bottom side as a one-period sine wave ?